another coach and pursued, feeling certain he was on the right track.

But they were all too late. When the Stranger found Mrs. Jarley next day
she could only tell him that little Nell and her grandfather had
disappeared again, and he had to return with Kit's mother, much
discouraged, to London.

The part Kit had played in this made the dwarf hate him, if possible,
more than ever, and he agreed to pay Brass, his rascally lawyer, to ruin
the lad by making a false charge of theft against him.

One day, when Kit came to Brass's house to see the Stranger, who lodged
up stairs, the lawyer cunningly hid a five-pound note in the lad's hat
and as soon as he left ran after him, seized him in the street and
accused him of taking it from his office desk.

Kit was arrested, and the note, of course, was found on his person. The
evidence seemed so strong that the poor fellow was quickly tried, found
guilty and sentenced to prison for a long time.

All might have gone wrong but for a little maid-servant of Brass's, whom
the lawyer had starved and mistreated for years. He used to keep her
locked in the moldy cellar and gave her so little to eat that she would
creep into the office at night (she had found a key that fitted the
door) to pick up the bits of bread that Dick Swiveller, Brass's clerk,
had left when he ate his luncheon.

One night, while this little drudge was prowling about above stairs,
she overheard Brass telling his sister, Sally (who was his partner and
colder and crueler and more wicked even than he was), the trick he was
going to play. After Kit was arrested she ran away from Brass's house
and told her story to Kit's employer, who had all along believed in his
innocence.

Brass in the meantime had gone to Quilp to get his reward for this evil
deed, but the terrible dwarf now only laughed at him and pretended to
remember nothing at all about the bargain.

This so enraged the lawyer that, when he was brought face to face with
the little maid's evidence and found that he himself was caught, he made
full confession of the part Quilp had played, and told the whole story
to revenge himself on the dwarf.

Officers were sent at once to arrest Quilp at a dingy dwelling on a
wharf in the river where he often slept with the object of terrifying
his wife by his long absences. Here he had set up the battered
figurehead of a wrecked ship and, imagining that its face resembled that
of Kit whom he so fiendishly hated, he u